Finally helping organize a software conference

In the first few years of college, I was heavily involved in organising student communities. I helped organize the Astronomy Club at IIT Madras for the first four years of my college life, among other communities that I was a part of. But I stopped after my fourth year.

After graduating, I got interested in being a part of software communities in the cities I was working out of but I never helped organize the communities. Pune, Chennai, Austin, Cambridge. Local meetups, PyCon India, SciPy India. I attended a few meetups at each of these places, maybe gave a talk or two, but I never helped organize the actual communities. I briefly volunteered to help organize a few meetups but I soon realized the additional work and my effort trailed off pretty quickly.

Things finally changed. I helped organize the HydFOSS software conference at T-Hub on Saturday (29 July, 2023) and I am incredibly proud of what we have been able to achieve. 150+ people attended the conference. We invited 3 speakers from around the country and 6 speakers, selected from an open call for proposals. We had a few lightning talks and did a lot of networking. At the end of the day, the community expressed a lot of joy for the event finally happening in Hyderabad and we had a lot of interest from the community to start running a meetup every month.

If you want to read more about what all went into organizing the conference, before the day of the event and during the event itself, read this post on the FOSS United forum.

After a very long time, I feel like I have the energy to help organize communities again, this time around it's professional software developer communities. The journey with FOSS United since December has been interesting and I'm pretty excited about what the future holds for us. IndiaFOSS 3.0 is coming up in October. PyCon India is happening in September. Maybe SciPy India will happen towards the end of the year. Exciting times ahead.

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